Slave in a Palanquin - Colonial Servitude and Resistance in Sri Lanka
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2020
Language: eng
Number of pages: 304
ISBN-13: 9780231197625
Description: "From the very early days of the Western colonial project, the island of Sri Lanka was a crucial stopping point in the Indian Ocean. For four hundred years, Sri Lanka transferred from the Portuguese, to the Dutch, to the British, serving for all of them as a crossroads in transnational trade in the imperial period. Often overlooked is the extent to which this island became a waystation in colonists' Indian Ocean slave trade, with enslaved Africans coming to work on island plantations there and Sri Lankans exported to other colonies as forced labor 'coolies.' Recovering the individual voices of enslaved people in this unique locale, Slave in a Palanquin explores how slavery in the Indian Ocean world was just as embedded in the fabric of everyday life and in transnational encounters as it was in its far more prominent Atlantic Ocean cousin. Scholars have argued that the fact that there were fewer slaves in places like Sri Lanka than in the Americas, and that the region had a tradition of temporarily bonded labor, means no real slave trade activity of any consequence existed there, but Nira Wickramasinghe draws upon archival sources to dispute these false memories and false equivalencies. Further, the book demonstrates that even though the official end of slavery in Sri Lanka and the surrounding region came early, in 1844, and without devastating revolutions like those in Haiti and the United States, the transition was by no means painless. Instead of leading to real emancipation, she argues, the end of formal slavery led to an ambivalent freedom filled with bonded plantation labor and indentured servitude, with lasting negative consequences. A true subaltern history, this book rethinks not only the local history of colonial Sri Lanka but also the history of the Indian Ocean world"--